Sunday, 20 July 2014

Do you love to buy a nice notebook when you see one? I do. Do you say to yourself, 'You can never have too many nice notebooks' or 'A nice notebook will always come in handy'? I do. Do you go to lovely shops and exhibitions and think, 'Oh everything is so expensive but I could just get a nice notebook to remember the day by'? I do. Do you have a large box overflowing with nice notebooks, some that you feel are just too nice to use? And some that are no longer nice enough? I do.

I admit that I'm a notebook addict. And a diary addict. It can't be right to have eight unused diaries from past years -- although I fully intend to use them when the right combination of dates and days comes around again.

In fact, for anyone else with this problem, here's a handy guide:Upcoming year: Use diary from:
2015 2009 (You have to watch out for leap years as well as what day the year starts on)
2016 1988
2017 2006 or 1995
2018 2007 or 2001
2019 2013 or 2002
2020 1992

Great, by the end of the decade I'll have had the opportunity to re-use two whole diaries! Who knew years were so pernickety! Actually I make my own diary each year now, so, let's face it, they are never going to get used.

This is my current diary

But the notebooks, the notebooks. They're so seductive, with their cool, creamy pages and covers that invite you to jump in to another existence.

Wednesday, 16 July 2014

You'll have to forgive me for blowing my own trumpet, but I nearly fell off my chair when I saw that Janine Vangool, the creative wonder behind Uppercase magazine, had chosen my photo as the header for her latest letter to readers. I had submitted some shots of my tiny coloured toy collection for the colour-themed issue (no.22) but had had a note to say they weren't going to use it. I had put it out of my mind and then up it popped in my inbox this morning. I feel very honoured and chuffed.

A note from Janine the previous week had brought news that running one of the best magazines on the planet isn't necessarily that easy or lucrative as she said she had had to lay off her two employees. The only answer, really, is for more people to subscribe to the magazine so that the massive amount of work required for each issue generates more income. It would be a terrible shame if Uppercase didn't continue on its glorious, colour-saturated path.

Tuesday, 8 July 2014

When we were doing our Found and Chosen stall in Letchworth the other weekend, the best thing that happened (on what was a rather low-key rainy day, as it turned out), was that a gentleman called Tony stopped on the way past. He said he was just on the way to Prontoprint to see if they could do something with some old photos he had, but maybe I'd like to do it? He had seven photos in an envelope in his pocket.
I said yes straight away without thinking about it too much and then I took down the details of what he wanted. The people in the photos were all siblings from the same family and one of them was coming up to a big birthday, so it was a question of putting them all into one picture to make a gift. He had clear ideas about what he wanted, which always helps.
It was very satisfying using Photoshop to balance the pictures and then cut them out and piece them together. I'd love to do more work like this. And Tony seemed happy when I took his picture round to him.

I have his permission to blog about this but I don't want to put too many pictures up as it's his own affair, really. But I was delighted that the opportunity came up and glad I was in the right place at the right time.

Sunday, 6 July 2014

This post is rather self-indulgent, so I beg your indulgence.
The picture above is of my school ring-binder, which I've kept for ... just over four decades. It's hideous, covered with horrible striped sticky-backed plastic and then adorned with stickers. It's the stickers that fascinate me. They are insanely eclectic and ugly -- I can remember that I was so crazy for stickers that the actual content of the stickers didn't matter. I just had to have stickers. The folder reflects my completely uncritical love of adhesive cutouts and is a weird reminder of myself at the age of eleven.

I was NOT an official member of the Osmonds Fan Club Europe (founded on 1st January 1973 by Maureen Street). I didn't even like the Osmonds. On 2nd November of that year my Mum went down to London on her own for a few days, staying as we usually did in the Britannia Hotel, Grosvenor Square (it was owned by British Rail and you could get good deals if you booked the hotel at the same time as your train ticket). She sent me a postcard which read, "When I arrived at the hotel,
which is lovely, I found a great crowd of screaming girls yelling p*** o** at
anyone who dared to look at them, standing outside … and what do you think? The
Osmonds are staying at the same place!!! I wonder if I shall see them? What a
treat – I don’t think." She didn't like them either.

This folder is full of things I didn't like: I wasn't remotely interested in cars... or anything to do with them...

Nor religion (though now I come to think of it I think it was 1973 when I was briefly lured to 'Joyseekers Club' at school because a nice boy called Nigel used to go and I liked walking home with him afterwards)...

Radio Tees and Radio Cleveland were our local radio stations. My best friend and I once got 'The Sloop John B' by the Beach Boys played as a request on Radio Tees -- strange choice (we liked singing harmonies to it). Radio Tees was commercial and we always felt a bit naughty listening to it, as it if was Radio Caroline. It wasn't.

The dancing hippo is a Vari-vue or lenticular sticker with a movement effect when you tip it back and forth. Apparently they were given away in Spar supermarkets in 1973 and are now quite rare. It's Disney and I'm afraid I was a terrible snob about Disney when I was a kid too, always bemoaning the way they had 'ruined' 101 Dalmatians and Winnie the Pooh. Even so, sticker lust won out and here is Hyacinth Hippo from Fantasia (which I've still never seen and would quite like to now) on my folder.

Really, the only things on the folder that genuinely reflect my passions, growing up, are the (unbelievably dull) stickers in French -- I would go on to study French at university...

'For children, sight is the future'

... and Gallery Five

I truly adored everything that Gallery Five did, especially these animal stickers. I recently tracked down some sheets of them -- the nostalgia!:

I can remember staring obsessively at the sheets to work out the permutations of patterns, and, of course, putting them in order of how much I liked them. This would have consequences for how I used them and which ones I gave to my best friend, if any. They were potent. I could almost lose myself in contemplation of them (which worries me a bit now, but they don't seem to have done me any lasting harm... as far as I'm aware).
I had this one as a sticker on my bedhead:

I felt it watched over me while I slept (well, I didn't have the comfort of religion, so I needed something...).
I just can't understand why Gallery Five isn't better known and why there's hardly anything by them on the internet. Why aren't there passionate collectors sharing their collections? I've got tons of Gallery Five gift tags -- I love them. Gallery Five still exists. They mainly sell Beryl Cook cards now. Not long ago I rang them up, just to see whether they still have any of the Seventies designs. I spoke to the sales manager who told me that Jan Pienkowski, who started Gallery Five and did a lot of the early designs (including all the ones above) kept careful yearbooks of all the designs but doesn't want to licence them to other companies as he wouldn't have control over what was done with them. I would give anything to look through those yearbooks. It would be heaven. But for now, I treasure my very odd folder which is itself a sort of 'yearbook' of my life in 1973. Yow!